Staring into the unknown, I get lost.
Turn on the flashlight, look into the binoculars, and stare. With squinting eyes, pointing fingers, and a flashlight in my hand, I was the nerdy eight-year-old who had an obsession with the night sky. Outer space holds many wonders. Imagine, illuminated celestial bodies— unified, yet so distant — traveling throughout the black void of space and the warped grey clouds framing the twinkling, milky speckles of the sky. While staring into the ocean of emptiness, I contemplated the philosophical.
“Are there other universes?”
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“What happens in a black hole?”
“Are we alone?”
With my grandfather’s binoculars whose enormity was too large for my small face, I was overcome with wonder and awe as I moved my binoculars from the North to the South. I skimmed across the sky and surveyed the expanse that I lay beneath: the endless abyss of space.
Notorious for its distant nebulae, powerful novas, and countless stars, space is the apex of mystery. Despite the eerie and ominous surroundings, I felt calm. Just gazing at the overhead blackness stole about every thought from my mind – a carousel of forgotten dreams and memories – and all my worries slowly crumbled away as time passed. Space was ultimately my safe space.
Stars. Remarkably simple, flickering lights to people on Earth, but in reality are large and destructive balls of fire moving at light speeds. The stars further away, almost impossible to see with the naked eye and outside of human comprehension, were like small scattered moondust in a blanket of darkness. With my SARD 7×50 binoculars, I searched for asterisms that I recalled from my second-grade excursion to the planetarium – the Big Dipper and Orion’s Belt, to be exact. I probed the realms of trigonometry – fine-tuned by the angles in constellations in the sky- and explored ways to somehow connect all the stars to make one large asterism.
Space fueled my imagination and curiosity. With my Maglite flashlight in hand, I outlined different shapes with its powerful beam of photons pointed it at the moon to see if I could see its shadow on the surface. How silly of me to think of this. In addition, I stared and admired the golden aura the moon was radiating throughout the atramentous curtain of sky. She was smiling, so I smiled back. As I inspected every glisten, movement, and shape of the moon and stars, I became an astronomer. I was Galileo Galilei, but rather than formulating astronomical observations, I navigated the midnight sky for intricate patterns and cosmos that I had never seen in my life. Before inevitably being carried by my father to go inside, I thrust the entirety of my weight upon my father’s shoulder to get a glimpse of the sky for the last time.
